Month: June 2007

  • The Special Edition

    So I’m popping in to HMV after work to look for an album, and can’t help but notice all the special editions of albums that are on sale. It’s pretty typical these days for albums to be packaged in at least two different manners. It might be that one set comes with an additional DVD,…

  • Programme Scheduling

    The undoubted hit TV show of the last week or so has been a strange talent show called “Britain’s Got Talent.” Now I haven’t watched a single episode, but seemingly 11m tuned in for the final yesterday evening to see an opera singer win (Great! More light operatic albums on the horizon. We sure do…

  • Misc

    BBC Parliament is covering the Falkland Islands crisis by replaying the BBC News coverage of the time, linked by Brian “I counted them all out, and I counted them all back” Hanrahan. I’m flicking between a Sky+ recording of this and Lewis Hamilton winning the US Grand Prix at Indianapolis. Incidentally, isn’t it ridiculous that…

  • Old Man’s War

    I picked this up in Waterstones the other day, purely because it was the SF novel of the month. But I’m glad I did. John Scalzi has created an interesting world in which 75 year-olds, their bodies decrepit despite organ transplants and cosmetic surgery, sign up to fight for the Colonial Defence Force, millions of…

  • Nature Girl

    Nature Girl is the latest Carl Hiaasen novel, and once again we have the usual set of misfits and ne’erdowells. The novel mainly takes place amongst Florida’s 10,000 Islands in the Everglades. The story is the usual complex affair of inter-twined happenings that, unlikely though it may be, all manage to be in the same…

  • Chronicles of the Winds

    This is something a bit different from Henning Mankell. I know him mainly… well exclusively really… for his Kurt Wallander novels. Or perhaps those of Wallander’s daughter, who’s lately become a police officer herself in the series. But Mankell has spent and still spends a lot of time in Africa. And that’s where this novel…

  • Stardust

    I’m really not at all sure how I’ve managed this, but I’d not previously a Neil Gaiman novel. This is a terrible oversight, since I own more than one, and I’ve been reading Gaiman’s blog pretty assiduously for the last two or three years (it’s really good). I did see the TV series of Neverwhere…

  • Impartiality and The Vicar of Dibley

    There’s an interesting report in today’s Observer which says that The Vicar of Dibley is likely to be accused of breaking BBC guidelines. The episode in question is the one I questioned at the time back on New Year’s Day 2005. Towards the end of the episode, viewers were shown a video supporting the Make…

  • If You’re Making An Authored Documentary – Be Sure to Wear Pink

    Both David Dimbleby and Andrew Marr have major documentaries on our screens at the moment. Dimbleby is presenting How We Built Britain, in which he travels the country in his trusty Land Rover visiting buildings that help explain the story of our nation. He does so wearing a pink shirt. Meanwhile Marr is presenting his…

  • Lynx Cans Revisited

    Back in February, I posted a piece about the new style Lynx deodorant cans and said that I thought the design was faulty. Well, as the comments to that post seem to confirm, I’m not the only person who’s noticed the fault. OK – four other people isn’t a great deal, but these are people…

  • The Sheer Randomness of Email

    I really did get my Google Talk application letting me know that these two emails arrived in fast succession.

  • Stoppard on the Radio

    The BBC finally announced today what The Stage had already told us – there is to be a Stoppard season on BBC Radio this summer. The headline piece is the radio debut of Stoppard’s most recent work, Rock ‘n’ Roll, which is shortly to transfer to Broadway. I was hoping for a repeat of Radio…